'Cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit' ... the gears of a pocket watch. Photograph: Corbis

"A poem", wrote William Carlos Williams, "is a small (or large) machine made of words". It's a nice, simple statement of a poetic position, but for many poetry lovers, the idea of comparing a sonnet and a steam train seems like heresy. Whether or not you agree, it is fitting that Williams's best-known poem, The Red Wheelbarrow, is not only a well-oiled mechanism itself, but also uses a machine – albeit a simple one – to illustrate his ideas on the relationship between poetry and the world.

Of course, Williams was writing at a time when machinery was striding centre stage, and the machine was the very essence of the New. Painters, composers and poets were quick to celebrate this modern reality. In Italy, Futurists such as FT Marinetti even spoke of a new species, the "machine-extended man".

But it wasn't just the avant garde that revelled in this new mechanical reality; even a poet as "traditional" as Rudyard Kipling found it impossible to ignore the pull of industrial change. The Secret of the Machines has something of both Futurist enthusiasm and Blake's vision of England's "dark, Satanic Mills". Kipling's ocean liners, telephones and drills are neither benevolent nor malicious; given that they "can neither love nor pity nor forgive", they can only be as good, or as bad, as the people who use them.

Tom Clark's Radio moves into a world of sentient technology, with a receiver which is not content with describing the world, but intent on creating a new world in its own image. The disembodied voices it broadcasts are like the recording on the answering machine in Linda Pastan's poem of that name. Pastan's poem is haunted by a double ghost; the intended image of her dead lover's voice on the machine and the unintended ghost of the answering machine itself, victim of the analogue's rapidly-increasing redundancy in our digital-drenched world.

While many poets have written about machines, fewer actually understand how they work. One notable exception to this rule was Williams's friend and publisher, George Oppen. Where Marinetti's motorcar was more mythical beast than mechanical conveyance, Oppen's Image of the Engine had an actual motor under the bonnet, and one that was prone to such disasters as "a ruined head gasket". Oppen was an intensely practical man, one who believed in getting his hands dirty; here he uses this expertise to build an image of mortality and of all things that end.

We can't all be mechanically minded, any more that we can all be poets; however, most of us have dreamed, at one time or another, of a machine that could perform for us those unpleasant everyday tasks we'd rather avoid. Shel Silverstein's well-known poem Homework Machine serves as a warning that we should be careful what we wish for – in case we get it.

So the completely unseasonal challenge is to write poems inspired by machines, engines and other mechanical devices both real and imaginary. You may be a Blakean Luddite or a Futurist-ic enthusiast; you may, perhaps, never have given our mechanical friends a second thought. One way or another, I hope you'll rise to the challenge and give us some small (or large) verbal machines of your own devising. And while we're at it, have a Happy Christmas.